Goodman’s Aesthetics

First published Sat May 7, 2005; substantive revision Wed Aug 9, 2017

Nelson Goodman has certainly been one of the most influential figures
in contemporary aesthetics and analytic philosophy in general (in
addition to aesthetics, his contributions cover the areas of applied
logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science). His
Languages of Art (first published in 1968 [Goodman 1976]),
together with Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960)
and Richard Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects (1968),
represents a fundamental turning point in the analytic approach to
artistic issues in Anglo-American philosophy. His often unorthodox
take on art is part of a general approach to knowledge and reality,
and is always pervasively informed by his cognitivism, nominalism,
relativism, and constructivism. From Languages of Art and
subsequent works, a general view of the arts as contributing to the
understanding and indeed to the building of the realities we live in
emerges. Ultimately, in Goodman’s view, art is not sharply
distinguished, in goals and means, from science and ordinary
experience. Paintings, musical sonatas, dances, etc. all are symbols
that classify parts of reality for us, as do such things as scientific
theories and what makes up common, ordinary knowledge.

Goodman’s personal life (August 7, 1906–November 25, 1998)
was linked to art in many and important ways. From 1929 to 1941, he
directed an art gallery in Boston: the Walker-Goodman Art Gallery. It
is through this commitment that he met his wife, Katharine Sturgis, a
skilled painter whose work is reproduced in Goodman’s Ways
of Worldmaking (1978a). In 1941, he received a Ph.D. in
Philosophy at Harvard University, with a dissertation, A Study of
Qualities (1941), that laid out the nominalist view that would
later be presented in his first book, The Structure of
Appearance (1951). He taught at Tufts University (1945–46),
The University of Pennsylvania (1946–64), Brandeis University
(1964–67), and, from 1967, at Harvard University, where he
became Emeritus Professor in 1977.

Throughout his life, he remained a passionate collector of ancient and
contemporary art pieces, as well as a generous lender and donor to a
number of museums. He was a rigorous philosopher who, however, never
lacked the capacity to talk to artists and researchers in other
fields. In 1967, at the School of Education of Harvard, he established
an interdisciplinary program for the study of education and the arts,
“Project Zero,” which he directed until 1971. Still at
Harvard, he founded and directed the Summer Dance program. It is,
then, not at all surprising that, amongst Goodman’s works, we
find, next to philosophical production, multimedia projects that
combine—indeed very much in Goodmanian fashion—painting
(including Sturgis’s work), music, and dance: Hockey
Seen (1972), Rabbit Run (1973), and Variations
(1985d).

One way of approaching Goodman’s aesthetics, and of seeing both
its unity and continuity with his work in other areas of philosophy,
is by recalling some of the ideas presented in one of his early works,
Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (originally published in 1954
[Goodman 1983]). There Goodman formulates what he calls “the
general problem of projection” (of which the famous “new
riddle of induction” is an instance). The problem is grounded in
the general idea that we project predicates onto reality (a reality
that is itself “constructed” by those projections,
according to the constructivist approach Goodman defended from the
time of A Study of Qualities [1941], hence in The
Structure of Appearance [1951] and, later, in Ways of
Worldmaking [1978a]). Hume famously claimed that inductions are
based on regularities found in experience, and concluded that the
inductive predictions may very well turn out being false. In Fact,
Fiction, and Forecast, Goodman points out how
“regularities” are themselves in a sense problematic. Take
such objects as emeralds, which we classify by using the predicate
“green.” They can also be said to be “grue,”
i.e., observed up to a certain time t and found green, blue
otherwise. Hence, our observations seem to equally grant two different
inductions—that emeralds will remain green after t or
that they will be blue. The problem is a general one, involving not
just hypotheses but the projection of any predicate onto the world.
Indeed, as we divide the world into green and blue
things, so could we divide it into grue and bleen
things (things that are observed up to t and found blue, and
green otherwise). Notice that, under a description of the world using
the “green/blue” predicate pair, there may be no change at
time t (no change in the color of emeralds and sapphires for
example), whereas there would be change under the alternative
“grue/bleen” pair. Likewise, whereas there may be change,
at time t, under “green/blue” (in case that, say,
an emerald is painted over at t), there may be no change
under the alternative pair, “grue/bleen.” The new riddle
of induction—and, in general, the problem of
projection—is, then, to explain what are the bases for
projecting certain predicates—“green,”
“blue,” “red,” etc.—onto the world, and
not others—“grue,” “bleen,”
“gred,” etc. For, as Goodman states it,
“[r]egularities are where you find them, and you can find them
anywhere” (1983, 83). There is no difference in principle
between the predicates we use and those we could use, but rather a
pragmatic difference in habit, or of
“entrenchment” of certain predicates and not others.

When one combines the idea of predicate entrenchment to that for which
our successfully projecting certain predicates (and more generally
symbols) rather than others modifies our observation and very
perception of reality (indeed it amounts to constructing
different realities), one has the basis for Goodman’s general
approach to our cognitive relationship to the world, of which art is a
fundamental component. Artworks, too, are symbols, referring to the
world (or the worlds they contribute to construct) in a
variety of different ways. Understanding the worlds of art is no
different, in kind, from understanding the worlds of science or of
ordinary perception: it requires interpretation of the
various symbols involved in those areas. Which symbols are
successfully projected over time—and, for instance, which
artistic styles are perceived as familiar and which ones as
revolutionary, or which linguistic formulas are categorized as literal
and which ones as metaphorical—largely depends on what is
customary, “entrenched,” within a certain cultural,
artistic, or linguistic community.

Most of Goodman’s aesthetics is contained in his Languages
of Art (which he republished, with slight variations, in a second
edition in 1976), although what is there presented is clarified,
expanded, and sometimes corrected in later essays. As its subtitle,
An Approach to a General Theory of Symbols, indicates, this
is a book with bearings not only on art issues, but on a general
understanding of symbols, linguistic and non-linguistic, in the
sciences as well as in ordinary life. Indeed, Languages of
Art has, amongst its merits, that of having broken, in a
non-superficial and fruitful way, the divide between art and science.
Goodman’s general view is that we use symbols in our perceiving,
understanding, and constructing the worlds of our experience: the
different sciences and the different arts equally contribute to the
enterprise of understanding the world. As in his works in
epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, Goodman’s
approach is often unorthodox and groundbreaking, and yet never in ways
that fail to be refreshing and suggestive of future developments (some
of those developments were pursued by Goodman himself in later essays
and, most notably, in his last book, co-authored with Catherine Elgin,
Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences
[1988]).

With respect to art in particular and to symbolic activities in
general, Goodman advocates a form of cognitivism: by using
symbols we discover (indeed we build) the worlds we live in, and the
interest we have in symbols—artworks amongst them—is
distinctively cognitive. Indeed, to Goodman, aesthetics is but a
branch of epistemology. Paintings, sculptures, musical sonatas, dance
pieces, etc. are all made of symbols, which possess different
functions and bear different relations with the worlds they refer to.
Hence, artworks require interpretation, and interpreting them amounts
to understanding what they refer to, in which way, and within which
systems of rules.

Symbolizing is for Goodman the same as referring. Hence, it is
important here to emphasize, first, that reference has, in his view,
different modes, and, second, that something is a symbol, and
is a symbol of a given kind, only within a symbol system of
that kind, a system governed by the syntactical and semantic rules
that are distinctive of symbols of that kind. Of course, natural
languages are examples of symbol systems, but there are many other,
non-linguistic systems: pictorial, gestural, diagrammatic, etc.

The fundamental notion which is at the core of Goodman’s theory
of symbols is that of reference—the primitive relation
of “standing for”—seen as articulated in different
modes, of which denotation is one, and as obtaining not just directly
but indirectly as well, sometimes across long chains of reference.
Indeed, one of the great contributions of Goodman to philosophy is his
investigation of kinds of reference or symbolization. Denotation and
exemplification are the two fundamental forms of reference out of
which Goodman develops most of his analysis. Denotation is
the relationship between a “label,” such as “John F.
Kennedy,” or “The 34th President of the United
States,” and what it labels (Goodman 1976, Chap. 1). In fact,
according to Goodman’s nominalist approach, possessing
a feature (or what ordinarily would also be called a property, such as
being blue) just amounts to being denoted by a certain
predicate or, more precisely, by a “label” (such as
“blue”). Hence possession is the converse of
denotation. (Of course, labels can be particular or general, as
reference can be to an individual, as in the “JFK” example
above, or, severally, to all the members of a set, as with
“blue” with respect to all blue items.) Furthermore,
labels are not limited to linguistic ones, i.e., to predicates:
pictures, musical symbols, and all other labels classify world items;
and what something is depends as much on the nonverbal labels applying
to it as on the predicates it falls under.

Exemplification—the sort of reference typical, for
instance, of tailors’ swatches—requires possession. In
addition to possession, however, which of course by itself is not a
form of symbolization, exemplification requires that the exemplifying
symbol refers back to the label or predicate that denotes it.
Hence, exemplification is “possession plus reference”
(Goodman 1976, 53). When a feature is referred to in this way, it is
“exhibited, typified, shown forth” (Goodman 1976, 86).
While any blue object is denoted by the label “blue,” only
those things—e.g., blue color swatches—that also refer to
“blue” and analogous labels exemplify such color, are
“samples” of it. An important characteristic of samples is
that they are selective in the way they function symbolically (see
also Goodman 1978a, 63–70). A tailor’s swatch does not
exemplify all of the features it possesses—or all the predicates
that denote it—but rather only those for which it is a symbol
(hence, e.g., predicates denoting color and texture, and not
predicates denoting size or shape). Which of its properties does a
sample exemplify depends on the system within which the sample is
being used: color and texture are relevant to the systems used in
tailoring, not size and shape. Exemplification is for Goodman a common
and yet, philosophically, unrecognized form of reference. Indeed,
throughout his own philosophical oeuvre, we find Goodman using
exemplification to explain a number of issues: most notably,
expression in art, but also, for instance, the notion of artistic
style (1975), how works of architecture can be attributed meaning
(1985), or the notion of a “variation upon a theme” in
such arts as music and painting (Goodman, Elgin 1988, Chap. 4).

Yet the paths or “routes” of reference can be of many
different sorts, and indeed symbols may combine in “chains of
reference” to give rise to instances of complex
reference (Goodman 1981a). There is, first of all, the sort of
symbolization employed by metaphors (as when human beings are
referred to as “wolves”), a mode of reference that becomes
crucial to Goodman’s analysis of expression in art. In analyzing
metaphor, Goodman (1976, Chap. 2; 1979) follows suggestions included
in Max Black’s famous article on the topic (Black 1954) but
expands and adapts them to his own view that denotational
symbols—labels—don’t work alone but rather as
members of “schemata” (“a label functions not in
isolation but as belonging to a family” [Goodman 1976, 71]),
normally correlated to some referential “realm.”
“Blue,” “green,” “red,” etc., for
instance, typically belong to the same “schema”—a
set of labels established by context and habit—and the realm of
reference of such a schema is made of all the ranges of things that
each label in the schema denotes (all blue objects, all green objects,
etc.). We have an instance of metaphorical reference when a symbol,
linguistic or not, is made to refer to something not
belonging to the realm normally correlated to the symbol’s
schema, i.e., not belonging to the sorts of things that the symbols in
the schema normally refer to. Hence, calling a painting
“sad” is metaphorical because a predicate that is normally
projected upon bearers of mental, emotional states is projected upon
an inanimate object made of canvas and wood and paint. Using the
notions of schema and realm allows Goodman’s analysis to include
the claim that typically metaphors bring about rearrangements in a
field of reference, which affect several labels at once. It is
important to emphasize that, for Goodman, metaphorical usage is no
less real or connected to knowledge than literal usage, and
metaphorical truth no less a form of truth than literal truth. Indeed,
the literal and the metaphorical in a sense lie on the same continuum.
Whether the application of a label (and the corresponding possession
of a feature) should be considered literal or metaphorical is just a
matter of habit—specifically, a matter of the age of the
metaphor, for old metaphors lose their metaphorical status and
become just literal applications. Using a metaphor himself, Goodman
claims that “a metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a
past and an object that yields while protesting” (1976, 69).
Notice that such a formula includes two elements: that there is
resistance to a metaphor (deriving from its literal
falseness) but also attraction (deriving from the insightful
reorganization of a schema of labels vis-à-vis a referential
realm, which the metaphor may bring about). A metaphor is a voluntary
misassignment of a label, but it is also more than that:
“Whereas falsity depends upon misassignment of a label,
metaphorical truth depends upon reassignment” (1976, 70
emphasis added).

Other rhetorical figures (although not all of them) can, in
Goodman’s view be explained in terms of metaphorical
“transfers” of this kind, indeed as “modes of
metaphor”: personification, synecdoche, antonomasia, hyperbole,
litotes, irony… (1976, 81–85).

Of course, the same item may perform several referential functions at
the same time, denoting certain things while exemplifying certain
features, and do so literally or metaphorically. Furthermore,
sometimes reference is indirect or mediate (Goodman,
Elgin 1988, 42), brought about by the combination of different forms
of reference into instances of complex reference. Reference
may, so to speak, travel along “chains of
reference” made of symbols that refer to, or are referred by,
other symbols. An obvious case is that in which a country like the
United States is referred to by a picture of a bald eagle, thanks to
the picture of the bald eagle being a label for a bird that in turn
exemplifies a label like “bold and free,” which in turn
denotes the United States and indeed is, furthermore, exemplified by
it (Goodman 1984, 62).

In general, how a symbol refers—whether it denotes or
exemplifies, what it denotes or which of its features it exemplifies,
whether it does so directly or indirectly, literally or
metaphorically—depends on the system of symbolization
within which the symbol is found. Furthermore, a symbol is the sort of
symbol it is—linguistic, musical, pictorial, diagrammatic,
etc.—in virtue of its belonging to a symbol system of a certain
kind. And symbols differ from each other according to their different
syntactic and semantic rules.

Indeed, a symbol system, say, the English language, actually
consists of a symbol scheme (not to be confused with the
above-mentioned notion of a label “schema”)—i.e., of
a collection of symbols, or “characters,” with rules to
combine them into new, compound characters—associated to a field
of reference. In the English language, for instance, the symbol scheme
is made of characters as the letters of the Roman
alphabet—“a,” “b,” “c,”
etc.—as well as compound characters such as “ape” or
“house.” Each character comprises all the verbal
utterances and ink inscriptions, i.e., all the “marks”
that correspond to it. The mode of reference fundamental to symbol
systems is denotation: characters denote, stand for items in the field
of reference. The scheme is governed by syntactical
rules—determining how to form and combine characters—the
system by semantic rules—determining how the
range of symbols in the scheme refer to their field of reference.

The fundamental notion with reference to which the different
syntactical and semantic rules of systems can be explained is that of
a notation—in brief, a symbol system where to each
symbol corresponds one item in the realm, and to each item in the
realm only one symbol in the system. Hence, for instance, a musical
score is a character in a notational system only if it determines
which performances belong to the work and, at the same time, is
determined by each of those performances (Goodman 1976,
128–130). In a notational symbol scheme all the members of a
character are interchangeable (that is, there is
“character-indifference” between the marks that make a
character) (Goodman 1976, 132–134). Hence, for instance, the
Roman alphabet is made of characters in a notational scheme because
any inscription of, say, the letter “a” (A or
a or a…) expresses the same character
and hence can be chosen at will, and because each of such marks cannot
be used for any other letter of the alphabet. The same is true, for
instance, of the set of the basic musical symbols used in standard
musical notation. Accordingly, the two syntactic requirements of a
notation are disjointness (each mark belongs to no more than
one character) and finite differentiation, or
articulation (in principle, it is always possible to
determine to which character a mark belongs). Symbol schemes that are
notational can be compared in their workings to the way
digital instruments of measurement work: for any measurement
indicated by the instrument there is always a definite answer to the
question, What is the measurement? By contrast, schemes that are
non-notational are well exemplified by analog systems of
measurement. For their complete lack of articulation, those systems
can also be said to be dense throughout: given any mark
(e.g., a mark in a scale) it could stand for virtually an infinite
number of characters, hence of measurements; or, equivalently, given
any two marks, there is a virtually infinite number of possible
characters between them.

For the symbol system also to be notational, more than
syntactic disjointness and finite differentiation is required. Symbol
systems are notational when 1) the characters are correlated to the
field of reference unambiguously (with no character being correlated
to more than one class of reference, or “compliance
class”), 2) what a character refers to—the compliance
class—must not intersect the compliance class of another
character (i.e., the characters must be semantically
disjoint), and 3) it is always possible to determine to which
symbol an item in the field of reference complies (i.e., the system
must be, semantically, finitely differentiated).With
exceptions that will have to be spelled out below, a musical score in
standard Western notation is a character in a notational system.
Natural languages like the English language have a notational scheme
but fail to be notational systems, because of ambiguities (in English,
“cape” refers to a piece of land as well as to a piece of
clothing) and lack of semantic disjointness (“man” and
“doctor” have some referents in common). Finally,
pictorial systems fail on both syntactic and semantic grounds.

The rich and systematic general analysis of modes of reference and of
types of symbol systems presented in Languages of Art allows
Goodman to address fundamental questions in the philosophy of art: on
the nature of the different art forms and the symbolic functions that
are central to them; on questions of ontology and the importance of
authenticity; on the distinction between artistic and non-artistic
forms of symbolization; and on the role of artistic value.

Languages of Art prompted a lively debate especially
concerning Goodman’s claims about the nature of pictorial
representation, or depiction. According to Goodman, the symbolic
function that is distinctive of pictures is denotation (1976, Chap.
1)—hence pictures are labels and in that respect are analogous
to linguistic predicates. The characteristics that distinguish
pictorial systems from other denotational systems (e.g., from natural
languages) make them the very opposite of a notation: pictorial
systems are dense throughout and in that respect are similar to other
analog systems, such as those of diagrams and maps (1976,
194–198; Goodman, Elgin 1988, Chap. 7).

At a first approximation, Goodman’s claim that “denotation
is the core of representation” (1976, 5) means that pictures are
pictorial labels for their subjects, individuals or sets of
individuals, analogously to how names, or predicates, or verbal
descriptions are linguistic labels for their denotata. Yet, of course,
not all pictures that have a subject—i.e., all pictures that are
representational, versus images that are non-representational or
abstract—have an actual individual as their subject. Some
pictures have just a generic subject (say, a picture of a man, in the
sense of a picture of no man in particular), others have a fictional
subject (a picture of a unicorn, for example). Goodman’s account
of such cases is in terms of multiple denotation for the
former and null denotation for the latter. Some
pictures—exemplary is an illustration of an eagle placed, in a
dictionary, next to the definition of the word
“eagle”—refer, severally, to all the members of a
given set, such as the set of eagles. Other pictures, such as pictures
of unicorns, refer to nothing, since there are no unicorns in reality:
they have null denotation. Goodman insists that the existence of
pictures with null denotation does not represent a problem for the
view that claims that “denotation is the core of
representation.” Such pictures are, of course, to be
distinguished from other pictures with null denotation, such as
pictures of Pegasus or of Pickwick. Yet, they are so distinguished in
being pictures of a certain
kind—unicorn-pictures—classified differently from pictures
of other kinds, such as Pegasus-pictures or Pickwick-pictures.

Hence, Goodman appears to analyze pictorial representation as an
ambiguous concept, ambiguous, that is, between a denotational sense
(“is a picture of a so-and-so”) and a non-denotational
sense (“is a so-and-so-picture”). This may be seen as a
disadvantage vis-à-vis “perceptual” theories of
depiction such as those proposed, for instance, by Richard Wollheim
(1987) and Kendall Walton (1990) (cf. Robinson 2000). Yet concerns on
Goodman’s treating the concept of depiction as ambiguous are
misplaced, for the phrase “picture of” and its cognates
can be easily shown to admit two different interpretations. What can
be called the phrase’s relational sense has to do with
what, if anything, a picture refers to; the non-relational
sense, instead, has to do with, as Goodman would say, the sort of
picture it is, or better with the picture’s depictive content
(see, e.g., Budd 1993). Indeed, Goodman is right in claiming that,
with any picture, there are always two questions: one, what the
picture represents, if anything; two, what kind of picture it is
(1976, 31). Rather, a much more real problem with Goodman’s
theory derives from his not addressing some of the most fundamental
questions regarding depiction. Goodman articulates his account of
relational depiction in some detail: pictures are symbols in symbol
systems that are devoted to denotation (although their members may
have individual, multiple, or null denotation) and that have certain
(primarily) syntactic characteristics. Yet, Goodman has nothing to say
on why certain pictures denote what they do. Lacking a theory of
pictorial reference is no oversight on the part of the philosopher
however. The fact is that Goodman is interested in investigating the
“routes” of reference (1981a)—how symbols can denote
or exemplify or refer in more complex and indirect ways. He is not
interested in the origins, or “roots,” of
reference—hence, with regard to pictures, in how certain marks
and not others have become commonly correlated with certain kinds of
items in the world. This is as much true of what pictures are labels
for as of which labels apply to pictures, that is, of how they are
classified. Hence, it turns out, Goodman also has not much to say on
the non-relational sense of depiction, i.e., with what makes a picture
the sort of picture it is (e.g., a man-picture or a unicorn-picture or
a so-and-so-picture). Why pictures are classified in certain
ways—as unicorn-pictures, man-pictures, and so
on—ultimately, is a matter of entrenchment of certain predicates
out of the many predicates available. Given the actual history of the
use of our symbols, certain pictorial labels (i.e., pictures) are
projected rather than others, and certain verbal labels are projected
over those pictorial labels. Accordingly, for the most part,
Goodman’s theory of depiction is better seen for what it has to
tell us on its own terms—in general, on what distinguishes
pictorial symbols from symbols of other sorts.

Pictures are distinguished from symbols of other sorts in virtue of
the distinguishing characteristics of pictorial symbol systems. In
particular, pictorial symbol systems are syntactically and
semanticallydense. That is, given any two marks, no
matter how small the difference between them, they could be
instantiating two different characters, and given any two characters,
no matter how small the difference between them, they may have
different referents (Goodman 1976, 226–227; Goodman, Elgin 1988,
Chap. 7). Hence, pictures are grouped together with such things as
diagrams, ungraduated instruments of measurement, and maps—with
those symbols, that is, for which, in simpler words, any difference
may make a difference: any difference in a mark may correspond to a
different character, and any difference in the character may stand for
a different correlation to the field of reference. Even a simple
picture, for Goodman, is dense, in the sense that any, however small,
mark on the canvas may turn out being relevant to pictorial meaning.
Whatever the merits of, or problems with, Goodman’s technical
analysis, the notion of density is certainly one way to account for
what other thinkers—most notably Kendall Walton
(1990)—have referred to as an “openendedness” in the
investigation of pictures.

Of course, as pictures are likened to such things as diagrams, they
also need to be distinguished from them. Goodman’s claim is that
the difference between pictures and diagrams is syntactic, i.e., has
to do with the composition of the characters or symbols. Pictorial
symbol systems, when compared to diagrammatic systems, tend to be
relatively replete. That is, to the interpretation of a
picture typically a larger number of features is relevant than to the
interpretation of a non-pictorial dense system. A drawing by Hokusai
may be made of the same marks as an electrocardiogram. Yet, while in a
linear diagram as the electrocardiogram only relative distances from
the originating point of the line matter, in the drawing a higher
number of features—color, thickness, intensity, contrast,
etc.—are relevant (Goodman 1976, 229–230). Diagrams
typically are relatively “attenuated.” Accordingly, the
difference between diagrams and pictures is only a matter of
degree: typically, with a picture a smaller number of
features can be dismissed as contingent or irrelevant.

There is indeed more that can be found in Languages of Art
regarding depiction, and indirectly regarding the notion of being a
so-and-so-picture or a such-and-such-picture. An important part of
Goodman’s view on depiction is his critique of the idea that
resemblance is the distinguishing feature of this sort of
symbolization. While Goodman may appear to be, and is usually
discussed as, criticizing the resemblance theory of pictorial
representation—the “most naïve view of
representation” (1976, 3)—his real target is indeed much
broader than that. After all, of the resemblance view he also claims
that “vestiges” of it, “with assorted refinements,
persist in most writing on representation” (1976, 3). What
mainly concerns Goodman in Languages of Art is to establish
the symbolic, and hence ultimately conventional, nature of
pictorial representation—is to draw similarities between
pictorial and nonpictorial forms of symbolization. With regard to
resemblance, Languages of Art echoes the claim in Fact,
Fiction, and Forecast with regard to regularities: resemblances
can be found anywhere, for anything resembles anything else in some
respect or other. Hence, Goodman does not deny the existence of
resemblances between a picture and its subject, rather he claims that
which resemblances are going to be noticed depends on what the system
of correlation employed makes relevant. To Goodman, pictorial
representation is always relative to the conceptual framework (that
is, to the system of classification) within which a picture should be
interpreted, in the same way in which vision is relative to the
conceptual frameworks with which one approaches the visual world. On
perception, Languages of Art echoes what Goodman had already
claimed in his 1960 review of Ernst Gombrich’s Art and
Illusion: “That we know what we see is no truer than we see
what we know. Perception depends heavily on conceptual schemata”
(Goodman 1972, 142). Thinking that vision may ever take place
independently of all conceptualization is to rely on the “myth
of the innocent eye”: “there is no innocent eye
[…]. Not only how but what [the eye] sees is regulated by need
and prejudice. [The eye] selects, rejects, organizes, associates,
classifies, analyzes, constructs” (Goodman 1976, 7–8).

Accordingly, realism in pictorial representations is reduced
to a matter of habit or familiarity, in contrast not
only to a resemblance account of realism but to accounts in terms of
amount or accuracy of conveyed information as well. Realistic pictures
can include inaccuracies—indeed, those used in games of the type
“find the n mistakes in the picture” include
inaccuracies by definition (Goodman 1984, 127). And the amount of
information is not altered, for instance, by switching from the
realistic mode of representation of conventional perspective to the
non-realistic mode of, say, reverse perspective (Goodman 1976, 35).
Goodman’s conventionalism is pervasive and uncompromising: even
the rules of perspective in the representation of space, he claims,
are conventionally established, and provide only a
relative—i.e., relative to culturally established conceptual
schemata—standard of fidelity (1976, 10–19). Realistic
paintings, drawings, etc. are those that are painted or drawn in a
familiar style, i.e., according to a familiar system of correlation.
To put it metaphorically, for Goodman, you always need a key to read a
picture—sometimes the key is more ready at hand, part of
one’s cultural background, other times one must find it and
learn how to use it.

There are claims, in Goodman’s account of depiction, that are
left unexplained, especially with respect to pictures with
indeterminate or fictional reference, that is, with pictures that
Goodman would classify by predicates like “man-picture,”
“unicorn-pictures,” etc. Of them, Goodman claims that they
have “purported” denotation (1976, 67), yet without saying
anything on how that should contribute to pictorial meaning.
Furthermore, as the analysis progresses, and keeps facing the
necessity to account for pictures with indeterminate or fictional
reference, as well as with the notion of representation-as
(as in a picture that represents Winston Churchill as a bulldog), a
somewhat puzzling claim makes its way into Goodman’s account:
that depiction in such cases is really a matter of
exemplification—exemplification of labels such as
“unicorn-picture,” “man-picture,” or
“bulldog-picture” (1976, 66). The motivation for such a
claim may be that of finding, after all, a mode of reference capable
of explaining the way in which such pictures have meaning, i.e., of
addressing the above-mentioned non-relational sense of depiction. Yet,
Goodman provides no argument to support the claim that a picture
representing, say, a unicorn is not just denoted by labels
such as “unicorn-picture” but also refers back to
those labels. Lack of actual or determinate reference cannot be
sufficient to establish that an item denoted by a label refers back to
that label. Furthermore, precisely because samples refer to the labels
denoting them selectively, an argument would be needed to the effect
that pictures of unicorns exemplify such labels as
“of-a-unicorn,” rather than labels as, say,
“picture” or even “painted by someone” or
“painted canvas,” which after all are labels applying to
such pictures.

In fact, in light of the above-mentioned ambiguity in the concept of
depiction, hence of the fundamental distinction between a relational
and a non-relational sense of “picture of,” we should
emphasize how much is left out of Goodman’s attempted
account of the concept. Notice how pictures may or may not represent
something, i.e., relationally; yet, insofar as they have depicted
content, they all are, non-relationally, O-pictures, or
P-pictures, etc., that is, pictures with an O, or P, etc. content.
Such non-relational sense of depiction is indeed the one a theory of
depiction ought to investigate (cf. Budd 1993), and Goodman’s
general claims on the syntactic and semantic characteristics of
pictorial (vs. verbal, or musical, or diagrammatic, etc.) symbol
systems do not seem able to encompass the fundamental question about
such a notion, hence in a sense the fundamental question for any
theory of pictorial representation (cf. Giovannelli 1997). To
illustrate, Goodman’s account offers suggestions on what makes a
symbol a picture of a dog rather than a verbal description of a dog;
at a very general level, the account has also something to say on what
makes a symbol a dog-picture rather than a dog-description. Yet, the
fundamental question for a theory of depiction is what it means that a
picture is a dog-picture, i.e., a picture with a dog as its depictive
content, a picture in which competent viewers see a dog, instead of,
say, a cat-picture, i.e., a picture in which competent viewer see a
cat. For better or worse, perceptual theories of depiction offer an
answer to that question; yet, no real competing answer is to
be found in Goodman. As mentioned, why some type of marks have become
correlated with a certain kind of depictive content (hence presumably
prompting a visual perception of such content when looking at the
picture) is a matter of entrenchment; and that, in turn, is a question
for the anthropologist and the historian, not the philosopher,
according to Goodman.

The notion of exemplification allows Goodman to offer his theory of
expression. More generally, it allows him to indicate an
important source of meaning in addition to denotation. Most works of
music, dance, and architecture, as well as abstract paintings, do not
represent anything at all. Yet, Goodman can show how, next to
artworks’ representational powers we must recognize, as a
central and pervasive form of symbolization in art, the capacity for
artworks to call attention to some of their features, that is, to
exemplify them.

As for the features that an artwork appears to exemplify despite its
not, literally, possessing them (as when, for instance, a painting is
claimed to express sadness in spite of the fact that paintings cannot
literally be sad) Goodman claims that such features are
metaphorically exemplified, or expressed. In brief,
a work of art expresses something when it metaphorically exemplifies
it. Accordingly, expression is not limited to feelings and emotions
but comprises any feature that can be metaphorically attributed to an
artwork: in architecture, for instance, a building may express
movement, dynamism, or being “jazzy” although, literally,
it can’t have any of those properties (Goodman, Elgin 1988,
40).

To expression and exemplification, too, the general rule for which the
relationship between a symbol and what it symbolizes is never
“absolute, universal, or immutable” (1976, 50) applies.
Hence, like representation, exemplification and expression are
relative, in particular they are relative to established use (Goodman
1976, 48).

Goodman’s suggestions on the role of exemplification in art are
in many ways enlightening. Applied to art, the notion seems to provide
semantic theories, like Goodman’s, with a way to justify the
attention we pay, not just to what an artwork symbolizes, by to the
artwork itself: we do so because we are made privy of, and are
interested in, those of a work’s features that are shown forth,
i.e., exemplified (cf. van der Berg 2012, 603). The notion allows to
expand the number of features that are deemed significant in a work,
while still explaining such significance in referential terms. A poem,
for instance, is not just a representational symbol; typically, what a
poetic work exemplifies is as important to its meaning and artistic
value as what the work represents. Accordingly, the goal of the
translator must be “maximal preservation of what the original
exemplifies as well as of what it says” (1976, 60). As for
expression, expanding the scope of the properties that can be
metaphorically exemplified, beyond the strictly emotional ones, adds
explanatory power to the theory, making it possible to say, e.g., that
a sculpture expresses fluidity (cf. Robinson 2000, 216).

As is the case for Goodman’s analysis of depiction, with regard
to exemplification and expression in art, too, one wonders whether
Goodman’s claims are meant to provide an exhaustive account of
such notions, and not rather just a very general, structural, analysis
of them. Whichever the case, Goodman’s proposal is much more
acceptable at that general level. More specific claims, such as that
expression and exemplification are relative to the conventionally
established symbol systems at work, like the analogous claim regarding
representation, prompt questions on the necessity, for Goodman, to
recognize naturalistic constraints on what can be exemplified, or
expressed, or represented by what. More importantly, when we examine
specific cases, it becomes unclear whether the distinction between
exemplification in general and expression in particular has been well
drawn. Since, for Goodman, not only feelings and emotions can be
expressed but also such properties as color or sound pitch, one
wonders what notion “expressing red,” said of a non-red
symbol, amounts to: how different is it from the notion referred to by
“expressing sadness” said of something (a musical sonata)
that literally is not sad? Furthermore, as a more general concern on
Goodman’s project of accounting for the nature, interpretation,
and values of artworks fully extensionalistically (i.e., just in terms
only of what they refer to), one wonders whether the role of property
possession is not undermined by Goodman’s insistence on
what a work exemplifies. Certainly, works of art have significant
features that they simply possess, without also exemplifying them. A
work of art may have to be recognized as, e.g., calm just in the sense
of having such feature (if needed, having it metaphorically), and such
feature be recognized as relevant to the work’s nature and
value—as something that the beholder ought to
perceive—without it being the case that the work
exemplifies or expresses calmness.

Be as it may, it is certainly worth considering whether expression,
hence exemplification, by requiring possession, requires possession
that precedes the item’s acquiring exemplifying function. It
could be the case that endowing a work with an exemplification
function could, at once, endow the work with the feature it
exemplifies, a suggestion that seems especially apt to works of art
(cf. van der Berg 2012). Whether something like that could be
explained, as Goodman would want it, with no reference to either the
intentions of artists or, more generally, the context of artistic
production remains to be seen. Certainly—and the concern, here,
is not just about expression, but about metaphorical reference and
exemplification more generally—the suspicion arises that
Goodman’s approach, in relying solely on the notion of symbol
system to explain reference (i.e., to explain what a symbol refers to
and how it does refer to it), ends up underanalyzing the key notions
at play: exemplification, metaphorical reference, and, hence,
expression. Goodman’s own understanding of symbol systems is
that they emerge when certain rules are codified. Yet, of course,
artists may succeed, it seems, at securing reference and endowing
their works with artistically relevant features within, and thanks to,
a specific context of production. Appeal to the rules of a system may
not be sufficient to explain how reference is indeed secured. That is,
and going back to an issue mentioned above, the rules of a system may
never be granular enough to offer a full explanation of how a work of
art exemplifies some of its features but not others, or is
successfully made to possess, metaphorically, features it
expresses.

Goodman’s theory of symbol systems, as composed of schemes of
characters that are governed, depending on the sort of system, by
different syntactical rules, and correlated to their extensions
according to differing semantic rules, is at the basis of his claims
on the identity conditions of works of art of different kinds. Given
the syntactic and semantic characteristics of notational systems, the
different art forms can be arranged on a spectrum made of the sorts of
systems that stand between a pure notation—where there is
perfect preservation of identity between replicas (or performances) of
the work—and fully dense pictorial systems—where every
work is an original.

Goodman relates the issue of identity of works to whether a
work’s history of production is integral to the work or
not. In brief, it appears that in painting and related art forms, such
as drawing, watercolor, and the like (where there is only one instance
of a work), but also in etching, woodcut, and the like (where there
can be multiple instances of the same work), aspects of the
work’s history of production are indeed essential to the
identity of the work. Only the actual canvas that was painted by
Raphael in 1505 counts as the Madonna del Granduca, and only
those prints that come from the original plate used by Rembrandt for
his Self-Portrait with a Velvet Cap with Plume (1638) count
as the originals of that work—anything else is a copy, however
apparently indistinguishable from the original. Art forms like
painting and etching are for this reason named by Goodman
“autographic” arts: “a work of art is autographic if
and only if the distinction between original and forgery of it is
significant; or better, if and only if even the most exact duplication
of it does not thereby count as genuine” (1976, 113). You are
looking at Raphael’s Madonna or at Rembrandt’s
Self-Portrait only if you are looking at specific items
properly connected, historically, to the artist who produced them. By
contrast, music, dance, theater, literature, architecture seem to
allow, although in different ways, for instantiations of the work that
are independent of the work’s history of production. You can
listen to a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
even if it is performed (as it would normally be) from a contemporary
print of the score. Art forms like music, dance, etc., accordingly,
can be called “allographic.”

As the examples above already illustrate, the distinction between
autographic and allographic arts is not the same as that between arts
that are singular and those that are multiple. Etching, for instance,
is still autographic although multiple. Incidentally, this could allow
Goodman to account for the interesting hypothesis, advanced by Gregory
Currie (1989), of superxerox machines capable of reproducing paintings
in a molecule-by-molecule faithful way. Such a cloning technique,
Goodman could say, would transform the art of painting from singular
to multiple, and yet without changing it from autographic to
allographic.

Nor is the autographic/allographic distinction to be confused with
that between one- and two-stage art forms, so distinguished according
to whether the realization of the work requires some form of
execution. A painting (which is autographic) is accessible once
completed, while a theatrical play (allographic) requires a
performance. Yet, allographic arts, too, can be one-stage, e.g., in
the case of a novel, and autographic arts be two-stage—woodcut
for example.

More relevantly, Goodman articulates his theory of work identity by
addressing whether a given art form allows for a notational system,
i.e., for a “score” that would “specify the
essential properties a performance must have to belong to the
work” (1976, 212). Accordingly, Goodman’s can also be seen
as a novel way to account for the fact that some art
forms—painting and sculpture for instance—do not allow for
performances, while other art forms—such as music and
dance—do. Advanced at first as a tentative approach, and indeed,
throughout presented as open to revisions, the proposal is developed
somewhat systematically, with the clear intent of showing its
potential for becoming a general and comprehensive theory. Music,
painting, literature, theater, dance, and architecture are all
addressed with respect to the question of their relationships with the
syntactic and semantic requirements of a notation. Goodman’s
framework ends up being quite technical, given the need to refer to
and explain the syntactic and semantic characteristics of notational
systems. Also, such terms as “score,”
“script,” and “sketch,” which all acquire
specialized meanings. By the same token, the questions are not asked
hypothetically or just as a mental exercise—in that sense,
trivial notations could be devised for any art form (Goodman,
Elgin 1988, Chap. 7). Rather, the questions are addressed with
reference to the systems of notations already existing, when they do,
and, more generally, with awareness of the actual history of the
various art forms.

Naturally, music and painting (and with the latter, of course,
sculpture) end up standing on opposite sides of the spectrum, the
first being allographic and allowing for a notation, the second
autographic and not admitting of any notation compatible with
practice. A work of music is, for Goodman, “the class
of performances compliant with a character” (1976, 210), where
the character is the musical work’s score. Consider that music
written in standard musical notation is, for the most part—or,
more precisely, for the “main corpus of peculiarly musical
characters” (Goodman 1976, 183), i.e., for the flags arranged on
the pentagram—in a notational language. All and only those
performances that fully correspond to, or “comply with,”
the score count as performances of the work. Even one small mistake on
the part of the performer, say, in replacing one note for another, is
sufficient to declare that, technically, a different work has been
performed. On the other hand, other, important aspects of standard
musical notation are not in a notational system: indications
of tempo, for instance, as well as the convention of letting the
performer choose the cadenza, give great latitude to the performer.
Hence, in Goodman’s view, while two performances that sound
almost exactly alike may not be performances of the same work,
radically differently sounding performances may be. Notice, however,
how the question of identity is here sharply distinct from the
question of value: “the most miserable performance without
actual mistakes does count as [a genuine instance of a work], while
the most brilliant performance with a single wrong note does
not” (Goodman 1976, 186).

One might be tempted to dismiss Goodman’s proposals for their
conflicting with ordinary language and musical practice. Yet, it is
most important to remember that Goodman is aware of ordinary practice
and does not expect it to comply with the philosopher’s
technical requirements (as “one hardly expects chemical purity
outside the laboratory” [1976, 186]). Nor is he interested in
reforming ordinary language: “I am no more recommending that in
ordinary discourse we refuse to say that a pianist who misses a note
has performed a Chopin Polonaise than that we refuse to call a whale a
fish, the earth spherical, or a grayish-pink human white”
(Goodman 1976, 187). Indeed, Goodman’s approach to the question
of notation is, in an important sense, grounded in previous practice,
for a notational system is an acceptable one only when projected
from a previous classification of works. Furthermore, the history
of an art form may include (as music did) an autographic stage, which
only at a later time made room for the establishment of a notation, on
the grounds of previous practice. Nor is Goodman’s approach
lacking in application to real musical cases, as his discussion of
alternative musical notations proves. Without, again, evaluating the
different systems of musical notation, Goodman shows how an
alternative system, such as the one proposed by John Cage, is not
notational, and is indeed in important ways closer to a
“sketch,” hence to a drawing, than to a score (Goodman
1976, 187–190).

What was just said about music also applies largely, in
Goodman’s view, to the art of dance. While dance does
not yet have a standard notation, Goodman finds the tentative notation
proposed by Rudolf Laban (which indeed Laban proposed for movement in
general) to be a good candidate for a notational system, indeed one
with fewer departures from notationality than standard musical
notation. And here is one of the many areas where the results of an
aesthetic investigation, however tentative, may be relevant to other
areas of human knowledge and activity. Goodman points out how a
successful notation for human movement could be of great assistance in
studies ranging from psychology to industrial engineering, in which it
is of utmost importance to find criteria for determining whether, say,
a subject or an experimenter has repeated the same behavior: and
“the problem of formulating such criteria is the problem of
developing a notational system” (1976, 218).

The conclusion that Goodman reaches about architecture is
also a good indicator of the importance placed, in his analysis, on
the actual history of an art form. Goodman claims that architecture
does have, in the architect’s plans, something quite close to a
notational system, and hence is, because of that, an allographic art:
different buildings, built in different locations and even with
certain differences in materials, would be instances of the same
work, provided that they correspond to the same plan. Yet, aware
of the history of the art form, namely, of its origins as an
autographic art and of a certain dependence, even today, on the
particular history of production of the particular building, Goodman
concludes that in fact “architecture is a mixed and transitional
case” (1976, 221).

As said, painting stands at the opposite extreme from a
notational system, since works in this art form are
“analogs,” characters in syntactically and semantically
dense systems. It is important to emphasize how that does not mean
that a classification of paintings according to a notational system
could not be found, or even found easily: a library-type
classification for paintings for instance. What it does mean, however,
is that, given the history of the medium and of the ways of
classifying works of painting, a library-type notation would be
incompatible with established artistic practice. The painting itself
(or, in the case of etching, only the prints using the original plate)
counts (or count) as the work. And what is true of painting
is true of the sketches that precede the painting. The sketch itself
is a work of art, and one that is autographic, in spite of its being
used as a guide to the production of the final work (Goodman 1976,
192–194).

Since the question of whether a notational system can be devised for a
given art form is ultimately a question on the possibility of a
“language” for that art form, i.e., at least of a
notational scheme, art forms that use natural language bear
interesting and sometimes surprising results. With a novel, poem, or
the script used for a play or movie, the text is a character in a
notational scheme. However, what counts as a work in such art forms is
different. In theater or drama, a work is a set of
performances compliant with what established in the script. As in the
case of music, Goodman’s analyses involve a departure from the
ordinary use of language: the dialogue of a play really works as a
“score,” while stage directions and the like are a
“script”—the former is fully notational,
syntactically and semantically, the latter does not uniquely determine
the performance, nor is it uniquely determined by the performance
(1976, 210–11). It is the “score” part of the text
that allows, in theater, for the work to be located in the set of
performances. By contrast, with a novel or a poem,
where no “score” is part of the text, and hence the text
is a “script,” the work, Goodman claims, is the text
itself (understood as a set of inscriptions fully corresponding, in
spelling and punctuation, with each other). Even in the later work,
Reconceptions, Goodman reemphasizes this claim (1988a,
49-65). While endorsing pluralism with regard to the number of correct
interpretations (i.e., “applications”) a text may
yield—indeed considering it often a positive feature of the
artistic use of language—Goodman insists that the work, in
literary art, is the text. Hence, in Jorge Luis
Borges’s famous Pierre Menard case (that of a fictional
French author trying to write a novel word-for-word identical to
Cervantes’s Don Quixote [Borges 1962]), Goodman claims
that what Menard produced was another inscription of Don
Quixote’s text, hence an instance of the same work, albeit
with his actions Menard may have suggested a possible, new
interpretation of that work. Incidentally, the contrast between
theater and the literature more narrowly conceived (i.e., as not
including drama) may raise a question regarding poetry. Qua text with
meaning (or “applications”, a poetic work is the text
itself; yet, qua text to be performed, e.g., recited out loud for an
audience, the poem would seem to be considered a character in a
notational system, a “score” with as its field of
reference the sounds to be uttered. On the other hand, in
cinema, an art form Goodman does not address, again, one
could identify, within the screenplay, a “score” in the
parts that indicate dialogue, a “script” in the scene and
instructions, with the ontology of the film itself, however, being
that of a multiple art form made of the concrete reproductions of the
visual and audio recordings that are displayed in the movie theater or
on the TV screen.

Goodman’s theory of notation, and the analysis of the differing
ways in which different art forms relate to that notion, establish
almost a system for the arts, one that perhaps has not yet received
sufficient credit from theorists working in aesthetics. Instead, for
the most part contemporary discussion has concentrated on individual
art forms and problematic examples.

Within the ontology of music, the claim for which the score fully, and
solely, individuates the work has received the most attention.
Separating ontological from evaluative claims, as seen above, Goodman
could not state his stance on the matter more clearly: “the most
miserable performance without actual mistakes” counts as an
instance of a work, “while the most brilliant performance with
one wrong note does not” (1976, 186). Of the two claims, that
compliance with a score is necessary for a performance to be
considered a bona fide instance of a musical work has been received
with way more controversy than the one for which full compliance is
sufficient to declare a performance a legitimate work instance. The
former claim may seem naturally problematic. First of all, it clearly
conflicts with actual practice. Of course, as mentioned, Goodman does
not aim at reforming ordinary usage. Hence, his view is a form of what
in art ontological discussions has become known as
“revisionism” (versus “descriptivism”; cf.
Dodd 2012) only in the sense that it separates ontological claims from
actual artistic and art critical practices, thus allowing for even
radical departures from such practices—yet, again, without
advocating their modification. Even if all that is granted, to many,
including thinkers who are sympathetic to the approach, Goodman’s
leaving no wiggle-room, so as to allow the inclusion of performances
that defer from the score for just minor mistakes (when not welcome
changes), is problematic. Indeed, and further, there seems to be a
conceptual problem in making sense of the claim on brilliant and yet
wrong performances. For, of course, if a performance is wrong, hence
fails to be an instance of a work, how can it then be referred to as
“brilliant,” i.e., a brilliant performance, ultimately,
of such work (Ridley 2013)? The more general and interesting
question, here, may be whether Goodman’s theory has the resources to
account for the kinship an incorrect performance of Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony has to the Fifth, which other musical
pieces (performances of Three Blind Mice to use
Goodman’s example) lack. Again, on Goodman’s behalf, dividing,
here, might be the only way to conquer. The ontological claim on what
individuates an artwork—hence, on what counts as a bona fide
instance or performance of a work—is in itself independent of
claims, in themselves not even philosophical, on what makes a musical
piece recognizably similar (or virtually identical) to another. None
of Goodman’s ontological claims need to deny such empirical facts.
Further, recognizability, here, may interestingly intersect with
symbolization. After all, Goodman is keenly interested in the symbolic
relations between works of art (including, e.g., works that count as
variations on the same theme; see 1976, 260–261, and Goodman,
Elgin 1988, Chap. 4). A performance that aims, say, at an especially
intense and driven rendering of a piece and, as a consequence of that,
includes, perhaps unavoidably, departures from the prescribed notes,
may be considered a (brilliant) rendering of such a piece by
virtue of reference to, including exemplication of, the piece as
individuated by the original score, although, ontologically, be
considered—as it should be, Goodman would insist—an
instance of a distinct work.

Especially when concentrating on just one art form and, hence,
possibly losing sight of Goodman’s more general and systematic
project, it might pass unnoticed that the separation between
evaluative and ontological claims, in Goodman, is borne by an approach
for which whatever individuates an artwork in the different art forms
does not necessarily individuate all of the artwork’s
properties, in which, aesthetically, we are interested. What Goodman
says, e.g., about literature applies to all art forms: “defining
literary works no more calls for setting forth all their significant
aesthetic properties than defining metals calls for setting forth all
their significant chemical properties” (1976, 210). After all,
in art forms like music written according to traditional Western
notation, which have developed a notation, we are legitimately
interested in the different performances of a work of art—and in
the best ones among them—precisely because what defines them as
performances of a work is not the same as the set of aesthetic
properties the work has to offer. On the other hand, one might be
suspicious of the degree of inclusiveness of aesthetic properties
(i.e., of non-work-defining properties that may nonetheless be the
object of aesthetic attention) Goodman allows. That is, one might
wonder whether the sufficiency claim, for which mere
compliance with a “score” (in Goodman’s technical sense
of the term) is all that is needed to identify, within art forms that
have notations, bona fide work instances. With respect to the
allographic arts, Goodman is opposed to making any concession to the
relevance of historical properties to the individuation of
artworks—it’s all left to the rules of the notation, at the
syntactic or, if applicable, the semantic level. Hence, a work of
music is whatever the “score,” semantically, individuates;
and a work of literature is the text itself, the
“script,”identified by the syntactic requirements of
notations. Yet, in either case, there would be room for a modified
notion of the allographic (investigated, for music, by Levinson 1980),
according to which a “score” or a “script” are
best understood, not just as structures, but as ones projected within
given contexts. Such a move would allow restricting the range of
aesthetic properties a given artwork can comprise. A performance of
Beethoven’s Fifth executed so as to last a year, within
such a notion of the allographic, could be considered the performance
of a derivative (and bizarre) work, not of the Fifth.
Similarly, interpretations of a novel that were to run against what is
compatible with a given historically located projection (say, because
anachronistic, or because incompatible with the genre a work is in)
could, then, be declared inadmissible, or admissible as
interpretations of an identical text, yet one projected within a
different context and effectively amounting to a different work.

It is worth emphasizing how Goodman, although he begins his
investigation with the autographic/allographic distinction (indeed
introduced as a rough approximation), aims at developing an account of
the role notation, at the syntactic or semantic level, plays within
certain arts but not others. The result is not just an explanation of
the autographic nature of some arts and the allographic nature of
others. It is a way more articulated account of the variety of ways in
which notationality, when present, has authority in identifying
artworks in the various arts, hence in differently determining the
localization of what counts as the artwork. To sum up, where a
“score” is present, hence syntactic and semantic
notationality, usually, the work is a compliance class of
performances. Where a “script” is present, hence a
notation only at the syntactic level, usually, the work is a class of
inscriptions compliant with such script. Where notation is not
established at either the semantic or the syntactic level, there is a
“sketch,” which is usually the work itself, as a concrete
individual or series of concrete individuals.

The complexity of the approach invites caution towards dismissing
Goodman’s reasoning on the grounds of alleged counterexamples.
It is quite clear how Goodman, throughout his work, takes himself as
mostly offering “suggestions” towards a theory, not yet a
complete one. Further, what he says about architecture, and the art
form’s being a “mixed and transitional” case, or
about drama, and its comprising, in the text of the play,
“score” and “script,” suggests looking at
ways, which Goodman seems to foresee, of combining parts of his
account, and achieving more fine-grained results than the mere verdict
on whether an art form is allographic or autographic, notational or
not. Hence, in addition to what mentioned above about poetry and
cinema, it is worth wondering what Goodman could say of certain forms
of installation and conceptual art. For example, when Sol LeWitt gave
instructions to create hisWall Drawings (works that were,
then, realized by other individuals), was he producing works that
represent an insurmountable challenge to Goodman’s distinctions
(cf. Pillow 2003)? One possibility would be to consider LeWitt’s
instructions as a “script,” which could in itself be
counted as an artwork (much as a literary work), but, also, as
instructions for the production of distinct works, constituted by the
drawings actually realized. Such drawings, in turn, could be
considered variations on the “theme” indicated by those
instructions, while each an individual work, a concrete
“sketch”; or, perhaps, each of LeWitt’s Wall
Drawings is best considered a work with unusual mereology, a
compound made of the “sketches”—one by one or all
together —and those instructions. Whatever the answer to the
questions arising in individual cases, the Goodmanian framework, with
all its limits and underdeveloped areas, can clearly offer a range of
possibilities and conceptual intersections. Somewhat relatedly,
Goodman’s willingness to claim that there are cases, as with the
class of performances of a John Cage’s composition embodied in a
non-conventional score that qualifies as a “sketch,” in
which work identity fails to be established (Goodman 1972b, 83-84),
may be worthy of further consideration, as the various developments
within art may have to make room for cases in which the identity of a
work is uncertain.

An issue closely related to the ontological question of the identity
of the work of art in the various art forms—indeed the very
issue that Goodman uses, in Languages of Art, to introduce
his theory of notation—is that of the importance of
authenticity in art and of the aesthetic relevance of being a
forgery. (Goodman’s comments on the question of forgery prompted
a small debate on that issue, mostly represented in a collection
edited by Denis Dutton [1983].) The brief answer is that authenticity
matters only where there is no notationality. Hence, for instance, it
makes no difference whether a musical piece is performed from the
original score or from a copy congruent with that, since the score is
in a notational scheme. Yet it does matter whether one is presented
with an original Rembrandt or with a copy of it, since paintings are
analogs, symbols in syntactically dense systems.

With regard to two visually indiscernible paintings, an original and a
copy, Goodman addresses the question whether there is any aesthetic
difference between the two pictures (1976, 99–102). Notice that,
if there is a difference, it must not depend on what one can visually
discern at the present time, for ex hypothesis, there is no
such visual difference that can currently be detected. Goodman’s
answer is that there is an aesthetic difference between the two
paintings even now, when we are unable to tell one painting from the
other, for an awareness that one is the original and the other a copy
informs us that a difference may be perceived, and indeed modifies our
present perception of the two paintings: now, for instance,
we look for differences between the two paintings, we train
our eyes and minds to discriminate differences that are currently
indiscernible (1976, 103–105). Goodman’s takes his claims
to be general and as granting the conclusion that “the aesthetic
properties of a picture include not only those found by looking at it
but also those the determine how it is to be looked at” (1976,
111–112). Hence, even with pictures that are not
“perfect” copies of other pictures, indeed with
any picture, knowing how it should be
classified—including its classification by authorship, as a
Rembrandt, a Vermeer, or a Van Meegeren—makes a difference to
how the picture may be perceived. For perceiving is, after all,
determined by the labels that one projects over what is presented in
front of one’s eyes. It must be noticed, then, that this claim
is all within a theory of perception and, while claiming that
non-perceptible features are relevant to perception, hence are
relevant to aesthetic experience, it does not claim that
non-perceptible features as such are relevant to aesthetic
experience.

Goodman’s account of style is a good example of a Goodmanian
“reconception”: the philosophical approach to the issue
must not only abandon the characterization of style as related to form
and hence contrasted to content (for, after all, that an author
writes, say, of social issues rather than battles should count as an
aspect of the author’s style), but must, most importantly,
recognize the role that classifications in terms of style have in
understanding and appreciating a work.

Goodman invites us to recognize elements of style in a work’s
content, in its form, and in the feelings
it expresses. His proposal is that the stylistic features of a work
make up a subset of the features “of what is said, of what is
exemplified, or of what is expressed” (Goodman 1978a, 32). In
particular, stylistic features are those symbolic properties of a work
that allow us to place the work in a certain place, time period, and
artist’s oeuvre. That is, style properties help in answering
questions as “where?”, “when?”,
“who?” with respect to a work—they function,
metaphorically, as a signature for a work: “style
consists of those features of the symbolic functioning of a work that
are characteristic of author, period, place, or school” (1978a,
35). Given what Goodman has said, when discussing the issue of
authenticity, regarding the aesthetic importance of historical
properties of a painting, knowing the style of an artwork is
aesthetically relevant, since “knowledge of the origin of a work
[…] informs the way the work is to be looked at or listened to
or read, providing a basis for the discovery of nonobvious ways the
work differs from and resembles other works” (1978a, 38). It is
in virtue of stylistic properties’ link to the symbolic
functions of a work of art that identifying a work’s style,
especially when complex and challenging and even difficult to
identify, is integral to “the understanding of works of art and
the worlds they present” (1978a, 40).

Goodman’s conclusions, on what roughly could be considered the
question of what is art as well as on the question of artistic value,
follow from his view that aesthetics is really a branch of
epistemology and that there is ultimately no sharp division between
art and other forms of human knowledge.

The aims of art are the aims of symbolic activity in general, and they
have to do with understanding. (Understanding is, for
Goodman, a broader concept than knowledge, one that is not bound by
literal truth, and that is thus applicable also to the literally false
and to what admits of no truth value: metaphors and paintings for
example.) Artistic symbols, as symbols in general, are to be judged
for the classifications they bring about, for how novel and insightful
those categorizations are, for how they change our perception of the
world and relations to it. The cognitive value of art counts as
artistic merit only because the symbols involved and the
experiences they bring about belong in some sense to what Goodman
refers to as “the aesthetic.” Hence, the question of when
such symbolic activities and experiences are aesthetic or artistic is
important, although, for Goodman, more in order to recognize the
commonalities between art and other human activities, including
science, than to isolate the artistic or aesthetic realm from other
areas of knowledge and experience.

Goodman proposes no definition of art nor of what makes an experience
aesthetic. Since to be a work of art is, for Goodman, to perform
certain referential functions, the question “What is art?”
should be replaced with the question “When is art?”. That
is, the real issue is to know when, typically at least, the symbolic
activity in question has features that bring us to call it
“artistic.” Hence, he suggests the existence of
symptoms of the aesthetic, i.e., symbol systems’
characteristics that tend to occur in art. In Languages of
Art, they were tentatively presented as conjunctively sufficient
and disjunctively necessary for an experience to be aesthetic. There
Goodman indicated four of such symptoms: syntactic density,
semantic density, syntactic repleteness, and
exemplificationality (1976, 252–255). In Ways of
Worldmaking, the list is enriched by a fifth element:
multiple and complex reference (Goodman 1978a, 67–68).
In his later contribution that those are only symptoms seems to be
taken even more literally: they are clues that indicate but do not
guarantee the presence of a work of art; and artistic status is
possible even without them. In other words, Goodman’s tentative
claims on this issue point to symbolic activities and features of
symbolic activity that artworks tend to instantiate. On these
grounds, Goodman can once again claim that “[a]rt and science
are not altogether alien” (1976, 255). The same features that
are characteristic, for instance, of numerical calculation—e.g.,
articulateness—can be found in musical scores, and the same
features that could be called aesthetic—such as
exemplification—can be found in scientific hypotheses as well.
In a more complete statement: “The difference between art and
science is not that between feeling and fact, intuition and inference,
delight and deliberation, synthesis and analysis, sensation and
cerebration, concreteness and abstraction, passion and action, mediacy
and immediacy, or truth and beauty, but rather a difference in
domination of certain specific characteristics of symbols”
(Goodman 1976, 264).

Goodman links artistic status to the performance of certain symbolic
functions in certain ways. Yet, his emphasis on the importance of
asking when art is rather than what art is should be
seen as anti-essentialist claim with respect to art: there is no one
property or set of properties, not even a function or set of
functions, that are distinctive of art objects. On the other hand,
that emphasis should not be taken to suggest that artworks can slip in
and out of artistic status just on the grounds of use. Certainly,
Goodman is committed to claiming that something can be a work of art
at one time and not another (1978a, 67). Yet, he also emphasizes how
artistic status is somewhat permanent: “The Rembrandt painting
remains a work of art, as it remains a painting, while functioning
only as a blanket” (1978a, 69).

Goodman’s positive claims with respect to the experience of art
are certainly to be taken seriously, in spite of the fact that the
negative claims preceding them, once read in light of the later
developments and applications of cognitive science to art, may sound
too quickly dismissive. Goodman emphasizes the cognitive role
of emotions in the apprehension of a work of art (1976, 248). In art,
he emphasizes, feeling emotions, whether positive or negative,
pleasant or unpleasant, is a way to perceive the work and the world
through the work. Feeling melancholy when listening to a piece of
music, for instance, may be a way to perceive musical features of the
work, as well as to perceive the world in terms of them. Hence, the
emotions serve the understanding. On the other hand, such claims as,
for instance, that the view according to which “art is concerned
with simulated emotions suggests, as does the copy theory of
representation, that art is a poor substitute for reality”
(1976, 246) are, in light of more recent developments, in tension with
other claims by Goodman, such as that the “actor or
dancer—or the spectator—sometimes notes and remembers the
feeling of a movement rather than its pattern, insofar as the two can
be distinguished at all” (1976, 248). For the sort of phenomena
mentioned in the latter claim may very well be best explained by
cognitive theories that consider mental simulation and other forms of
mimicry central to certain imaginative activities as well as to
memory.

Art has a general importance to the knowledge enterprise, which is
addressed with special clarity in Ways of Worldmaking. A
primary thesis in that work “is that the arts must be taken no
less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and
enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of the
understanding, and thus that the philosophy of art should be conceived
as an integral part of metaphysics and epistemology” (1978a,
102). A more general thesis of the book is that the multiple and
competing “versions” of the world that humankind
makes—through scientific theories (claiming, e.g., that the Sun
is the center of the universe, or claiming that the Earth is) but also
through mythology, art, philosophy, and so on and so
forth—literally make worlds; they
“fabricate” what we call “facts.” And there
isn’t just one, all-embracing version of the world:
multiple and incompatible versions are possible. That is, Goodman is a
constructivist and a relativist. His relativism, however, is not one
of laissez-faire: versions can be distinguished between right and
wrong, and indeed attempts to construct a world may fail. For the
worlds that Goodman posits are not possible worlds brought about by
possible descriptions of the world. Rather, when the versions are
right, they are all part of the actual world.

For such metaphysical and epistemological approach to include the arts
amongst the means to construct worlds, one needs only to add that
versions of the world include non-verbal versions and non-literal
versions as well. Art forms that do not use language, such as painting
or music or architecture, can offer ways of perceiving and
understanding the world—indeed ways to construct a
world—allowing us, for instance, to see and hear and perceive
things in new and refreshing ways. Works of art can participate in
worldmaking precisely because they have symbolic functions (1978a,
102). As linguistic labels categorize the world (and new, unusual
labels as “grue” and “bleen” categorize it
differently), so do pictorial labels, for instance, categorize it in a
number of ways (and some of them indeed in new ways). Visiting a
museum can change our perception of the world, making us notice new
aspects of reality and allowing us to encounter a different reality.
Literal denotation, metaphorical denotation, as well as
exemplification and expression, can all contribute to the construction
of a world. Cervantes’s Don Quixote literally denotes
no one, yet metaphorically it denotes many of us. And artworks, by
exemplifying shapes, colors, emotional patterns, etc., as well as by
expressing what they literally do not possess, can bring about a
reorganization of the world of ordinary experience. This is not just
true in the sense that seeing a painting may change our way of seeing
the world. Works of art may have effects that go beyond their medium,
and hence music may affect seeing, painting affect hearing, and so on.
Especially in “these days of experimentation with the
combination of media in the performing arts” […] music,
pictures, and dance “all interpenetrate in making a world”
(1978a, 106).

1985d, Variations: An Illustrated Lecture Concert,
including live or taped performance of David Alpher’s “Las
Meninas” Theme and Variations for piano, guitar, oboe, and
cello, synchronized with presentation of slides of Las Meninas by
Velazquez and of Picasso’s painted variations on it, first
performed at the University of Helsinki. Conceptual design by Nelson
Goodman.